I enthusiastically second the emotion about Peter Schneider's Wall Jumper, a wonderful little book that's half novel, half otherwise. It is a real insider's account of what it was like to live in a city with a wall down its middle, a wall that (he says) informed people's dreams and psyches and that for many was just something to get over when they felt like it. Fascinating to me were his stories of those in the east who felt free to sneak over to the western sector to catch a movie or a drink with friends and who would then sneak back home. Hadn't we been told here in Amerika that the eastern crowd would risk bullets and dogs to get over the wall, with never a thought about going back?

A more recent novel set in Berlin that I enjoyed a great deal was Pleasured, by an English writer named Philip Hensher. (I purchased this from Amazon.UK.) It's not a thriller, but it turns on a plot to smuggle a big lot of Ecstasy pills into the east, as a way to bliss out the population and ... well, it's more about some interesting characters and love.

Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow offers some good writing about Berlin just after the war.

Although the recent movie was a bit of a mess, the book The Good German evokes Berlin in its immediate post-war occupation.

My guess is that The Third Man's divided Vienna offers a good taste of what Berlin was like after the war.

I started Anthony Beevor's book about The Fall of Berlin, 1945, but had to stop 100 or so pages in. It is brilliantly written, but that makes the horrors it describes all the more disturbing. I will get back to it, I am sure, but I will have to brace myself, first.

Two of my favorite between the wars novels are: Hans Fallada's Kleiner Mann was nun? "What now little man?; and Eric Kaestner's Fabian. Although Doeblin's masterpiece is supreme, Fallada and Kaestner are more accessible introductions to the social conditions of Berlin between the wars.

Christine Smallwood's evocative article on Berlin, triggered many memories. I worked there for two summers in the mid-seventies, before and during college, and lived and studied there for a year after graduation.

Being plunged into Berlin's peculiar mix - part glittering outpost of capitalism, part leftist student/punk/dropout countercultural mecca - when I found a job there the summer before starting college, was quite a shock. The jagged geography of the city forced me to learn, and come to terms with, its equally jagged history. The ethnic diversity, and the obvious tensions between affluent middle-class Germans and the Turkish "guest-workers", relegated to the ghettos of Kreuzberg and Neukölln, were an eye-opener to someone who grew up in the conservative, homogeneous milieu of Catholic Ireland.

Berlin is the city where I went through many rites of passage. My first real job - on a filling line in a schnaps factory, mind-numbingly boring, but the pay was good. The first time I got really drunk - on "Persiko", Berlin's signature peach liqueur - bad mistake! The first time I got comfortable enough with being gay to act on it. My first romance and my first breakup. The first (and only) time I got arrested - for jaywalking in East Berlin - was basically an intimidation scam, through which the East German police could "justify" relieving me of every pfennig of hard currency I had with me.

The year I studied there was like a gift. I was on full scholarship and I knew that any academic credits were non-transferable, so basically I was being generously paid to take any classes I liked. Free to learn Spanish and Russian, never mind that I was a math major. Free to hear von Karajan at the Philharmonie, to see Shakespeare at the Schaubühne am Halleschen Ufer, or Brecht at the Berliner Ensemble. Or just to catch "Harold and Maude" at one of the many funky moviehouses scattered throughout the city.

Memories of the border and the wall. I was lucky enough to make some really close friends in East Berlin, despite the practical obstacles posed by the wall. To spend the weekend with them required recrossing the border each night before and after midnight, as visitors' visas were valid for 24 hours only. Occasionally, I would smuggle across books that my friends had asked for - I remember one long conversation trying to convince the border guard that the reason I had a copy of Freud's "Totem and Taboo" was because I was reading it for a class. By then, my German was good enough to get away with it. But crossing the border was always a crapshoot - we used to gauge the local temperature of East-West relations by the frequency with which we would be taken aside and strip-searched.

The cold war cliché was that Berlin was a symbol of political and economic freedom. For me, it was the city where I found the personal freedom to explore and experiment, and ultimately, to grow up. I have a godchild there who just turned 21 - I can't wait to get back to visit.

I hesitate to add to Christine Smallwood's excellent reading list, but Peter Schneider's "The Wall Jumper" is worth mentioning, as is Alexandra Richie's history of the city, "Faust's Metropolis".

I spent a year working with Holocaust victims in Berlin in 2003-4, and Ms. Smallwood's article brings back all sorts of tingly memories. Layers of history pile on top of each other in that city, pride mixed with a guilty defensiveness, slicked over and brightened up with tentative post-reunification hopefulness. It's a gorgeous and unstable blend.

My flatmates and I (seven of us in a crumbling and colorful volunteer flat, two Americans, two Germans, three Poles) learned Berlin from the underbelly up, everything from secret Russian bars to a tiny movie theater where you knock to get in, order tickets and drinks at the bar, and curl up with a cigarette in a sofa to watch the show. But we also figured out that the roof and the fountain at Potzdamer Platz start changing colors at 10 p.m. We felt like spies, wandering around the fancy spots in our second-hand clothes, rationing our volunteer stipends, but it sure was pretty.